Tag Archives: haymarket

Traffic wasn’t going anywhere fast around Picadilly Circus tuesday lunchtime. It was backed all the way from the bottom of the still one-way Haymarket up onto Picadilly Circus and beyond:

Trying to turn onto the newly two-way Pall Mall:

And up the still one-way Lower Regent Street:

It’s presumably because we’re at a half-way stage, where Pall Mall has gone two-way, Haymarket and Regent Street remain one-way, and Picadilly is half-closed and half-way transformed:

All of these works are, of course, a massive wasted opportunity. But they can’t make things any worse than they were, can they? They could, if the announced removal of traffic lights makes crossing the road more difficult for pedestrians. But the new cage-less central reservation is supposed to make it easy for pedestrians to cross wherever they like through gaps in the traffic. We’ll see about that.

But Westminster have quietly made things worse in another way. I’ve not seen any blogs mention it, and can find no note of the change from Westminster. But I am sure I do not hallucinate it.

Jermyn Street runs parallel to Picadilly a single block south. As Google Maps indicates, it’s a one-way street, westbound from Haymarket to St James Street. A quiet back street, it provides an alternative to the Picadilly bus lane, or going all the way around the system on Pall Mall. Popular with cyclists* — though perhaps Westminster wouldn’t know that, since nobody really bothers to count them.

Except that this is now the view from Haymarket looking down Jermyn Street:

You can see where once a solid white line protected a cycle lane heading west. It has been burned out because this short section of Jermyn Street between Haymarket and Lower Regent Street, marked in red on the map, has been reversed, without even keeping the cycle lane as a contraflow, thus putting an end to this route.

Why? Smoothing the traffic flow, of course. And it’s for the benefit of pedestrians, you know. While pedestrian crossing lights remain at the intersection of Regent and Jermyn Streets (not that they are either necessary or helpful when a static bendy bus has been blocking them for five minutes), since traffic can only turn into, not out of Jermyn Street, a phase of the lights can be eliminated.

You can see the previous arrangement still on Streetview: a bicycle cut through for continuing along Jermyn Street, while preventing motor vehicles using it as a rat-run. Clever of Westminster to get rid of it under the cover of fiddling with the traffic lights.

The only question for which the answer isn’t obvious is whether this work was all of Westminster’s own initiative, or whether TfL put the idea to them.

It’s probably for the best. With all the chaos on Pall Mall and Picadilly, the narrow quiet route west from Regent Street is now choked with trucks and coaches trying to break out of the endless jams around it.

* I used the route frequently on the way to events at the Royal Institution on Albemarle Street, just off Picadilly. In the early nineteenth century, events at the Royal Institution were so popular that Albemarle Street became congested with carriages. After a particularly well attended lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it was made the world’s first one-way street, all in the name of smoothing the flow of this traffic.